Entries from November 2007 ↓

The Republican party either has a death wish or has been taken over by Democratic saboteurs who have secretly infiltrated its leadership in a vast left-wing conspiracy. I know of no other answers to explain what is happening here in Virginia. That state, my new home, is one of many that have “open primaries,” which means that anyone can vote in either the Republican or the Democratic presidential primaries, even if the voter is not a member of that party. The problem is, supposedly, sometimes Democrats vote with the Republicans, skewing the result.

So Virginia’s Republican leadership has come up with this bright idea: Before anyone is given a ballot in the Republican primary, he or she must sign this loyalty oath:

“I, the undersigned, pledge that I intend to support the nominee of the Republican Party for President.”

That means that I will not be voting! I am not going to bind my conscience or my vote by making such a promise, even if I end up voting for a Republican. And I reserve the right to vote for a third party candidate if the Republicans nominate someone I oppose.

I suspect this is aimed precisely at keeping away us pro-life voters. (After all, Democrats are not going to be voting in this Republican primary THIS year, since their own race is so highly contested.)

Many of us have said that if the pro-death Giuliani gets nominated, we will not vote Republican. So this prevents us from voting against him.

My fellow Virginians, rise up against this attempt to take away your vote! Talk-shows, bloggers, come to our defense!

UPDATE: Thanks to the public outcry, the Virginia GOP has put the kibosh on the loyalty oath! Thanks for being part of the outcry.

The arts, of all kinds, give us insights into how and what their creators think and feel–that is, to their worldview. In this story on some of the grandiose building projects of Venezuelan dictator wannabe Hugo Chavez, Charles Lane draws on some actual aesthetic scholarship to make some revealing points about “high modernism” and why that style has been so attractive to totalitarians:

Chávez acts on an ideology that anthropologist James C. Scott of Yale has called “high modernism.” In his brilliant 1998 book about the phenomenon, “Seeing Like a State,” Scott explored the peculiar mix of good intentions and megalomania that has driven one unchecked government after another to pursue the dream of a reconcentrated populace: “a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”

Central to high modernism is an aesthetic sense that prefers straight lines and right angles to the crooked pathways and sprawling gardens of spontaneous rural development. Nyerere, for example, was determined to give his East African country a landscape dotted with symmetrical “proper” villages, like those he had seen in England.

Architecturally and ecologically unsustainable, high modernist projects always collapse of their own weight sooner or later. As Scott writes, “the history of Third World development is littered with the debris of huge agricultural schemes and new cities . . . that have failed their residents.” Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union fit that assessment also, as visitors to Germany’s Eisenhuettenstadt, begun in the 1950s as Stalinstadt, can attest. Designated “the first socialist city on German soil” by East Germany’s Communists, it was plunked down next to an immense steel mill and commanded to thrive. Today, the depressed city is hemorrhaging residents.

Yet the high-modernist experiments continue — think of China’s Three Gorges Dam and the accompanying vast uprooting of villages. Fundamentally, they are not about economics. High modernism is the architecture of centralized political control. When people live scattered across the countryside or, in the case of Venezuela, clinging to the mountainsides around the capital, they’re relatively hard to govern in any fashion, let alone by authoritarian means. In government-built grids, Scott notes, they can be identified, counted, conscripted and monitored.

As one of the lucky few whose satellite package happened to include the NFL network, I stayed up late last night watching the epic confrontation between the Green Bay Packers (my team) and the Dallas Cowboys (America’s team). Though the Packers lost, 37-27, it was a thrilling game, and I realize I may have witnessed a historic turning point. Brett Favre, the Cal Ripken of football, went down with an arm injury early in the game. But his back-up, Aaron Rodgers, came on the field and did a brilliant job, throwing 11 straight pass completions including a touch-down and moving his team up and down the field with alacrity. The Packers came within two idiotic pass interference penalties (from injured Charles Woodson’s backup) from possibly winning the game. Though I hope very much that Favre comes back for the next game to keep his games-played streak alive and to take the Packers to the Superbowl and beyond, the torch may have been passed. And Rodgers didn’t drop it, bringing hope to the Packer nation.

Instead of learning addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, are your kids doing math problems like these?:

A. If math were a color, it would be –, because –.
B. If it were a food, it would be –, because –.
C. If it were weather, it would be –, because –.

If so, they are learning fuzzy math. Read that linked article for how this postmodernist “constructivist” approach to mathematics has become such an educational fiasco. Try solving the above problems for “fuzzy math” (If fuzzy math were a food, it would be ___, because ___.)

Thanks, Webmonk and others, for pointing out the howler in that article that alleges that scientific observation might destroy the universe: The scientist was quoted as denying that we was referring to causality, but the reporter ignored his own source and went on to assert causality all through the story! (Why didn’t I notice that?) Still, the truth remains that science is becoming far less materialistic, common-sensical, and reductionistic than it used to be.

Frank Sonnek points out a better article that illustrates that point, how the very concept of a scientific law is up for grabs. The writer says that the very notion that there are laws that govern nature derives from Christianity, which gave birth to modern science. He also gets tangled up himself, saying that we must not allow ourselves to invoke a divine providence, that we have to find a solution from within the system, even though that is proving impossible!

According to this report, 62% of Americans believe that it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that the government knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks but did nothing to stop them.

In the linked article, Richard Miniter debunks the “evidence” often cited, but this raises another issue. Democracy alone is not necessarily a good thing, if the majority that rules is ignorant, easily manipulated, or fanatic. Thank God that what we have–and what is needed in Iraq, among other places–is a constitutional republic, a rule of law, that checks and balances even democracy.

As I construct my new site for this blog, it’s time to work on the blogroll. Many of the blogs I listed on the old World site no longer exist or are no longer active. This is my chance to bring everything up to date.

In particular, I would like to list the blogs of people who regularly comment here on Cranach. That way, readers are intrigued, for example, by tODD’s combination of confessional Lutheranism with relatively liberal politics, or Lars Walker’s literary reflections, they could go to their blogs for more. Bruce has a new blog that I like to visit. (Then there is Frank Sonnek. We urgently need a blog from him!)

My software keeps track of sites that link here. If you have a blog and link to Cranach’s new address, I’ll know, and then I’ll link to you. Assuming, of course, your blog is appropriate.(Since this Cranach blog is at a new address, www.geneveith.com, it’s important that you update your link to it, just as I need to update my links to you.)

As you may know, the number of links a blog has affects how soon it comes up on Google and so attracts more readers. Let’s help each other out here.

The state of Massachusetts is considering a bill that would make it a crime for parents to spank their children.

Which reminds me to put in a big plug for this blog’s reader and mentor Rich Shipe, who is heading an organization to promote the rights of parents. Specifically, his group is pushing for a constitutional amendment to that effect. Here is the proposed text:

The liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children is a fundamental right.

Neither the United States nor any state shall infringe upon this right without demonstrating that its governmental interest as applied to the person is of the highest order and not otherwise served.

No treaty nor any source of international law may be employed to supersede, modify, interpret, or apply to the rights guaranteed by this article.

Go hereto learn more and, if you want that amendment, to sign the petition. Go to the Parental Rights blog for some chilling examples of parental rights under attack.

Thanks to those of you who reviewed the Beowulf movie on this blog. You saved at least one middle school teacher from taking her 7th graders, which would have been highly embarrassing, to say the least.

One writer, Blake Gopnik, also found the movie falling short of the original, but he gave some different reasons. Mr. Gopnik said that when he read the poem as a young man, it was so compelling to him that he studied Anglo-Saxon in college so that he could read it in the original language. What he loved about it was precisely how different its imaginative world is from our own. The movie makers, though, thought they had to make it up-to-date and thereby eliminated its alienness, which is its biggest appeal.

reading “Beowulf” takes us to a new place, where people think about the world and its stories in terms that don’t make sense to us. That’s why it takes a year and more to come to terms with it (at least in Anglo-Saxon) and why the effort’s worth it.

I don’t buy the tired old cliche that “Beowulf” is great because it touches universal themes. What’s great is that it isn’t universal; that it’s its own thing; that its bards managed to build a world for us that’s so complete a package, in its verse and tale and coloring, that we can still get lost in it all these centuries later. Whereas watching the movie leaves us absolutely in the place and present where we started out. It’s just “Die Hard” in chain mail.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of “Die Hard” and “Spider-Man” and even trashier fare. (Did someone just say “X-Men III”?) It’s just that I’m also a fan of “Beowulf” as something very different from all that — as a work that truly makes you put yourself into the skin of an ancient Germanic marauder. What could be more thrilling than that?

In all their many interviews, it’s clear that the creators of the film could barely stomach the strange “Beowulf” they started out with. They didn’t dare imagine that, even with a little cinematic help, their audience might ever come to terms with its foreignness. Instead, they had to bring the poem fully “up to date” and make it easily digestible.

This is a brilliant point, applicable to much ancient and other-cultural literature and to the way they are translated. Consider, for example, many modern Bible translations. The up-to-date language tries to make Abraham and Isaac into one of our contemporaries. They are not! They are from an ancient world very different from our own. A good Bible translation, to be fully accurate, should faithfully render the strangeness and the obscurities, instead of trying to make everything familiar and clear when the original is not so. A good Bible translation should, like the Beowulf poem, take us into its world. That’s why the King James version–whose translators purposefully used language that was already archaic in their own time–is still so evocative and powerful.

Now that Mike Huckabee has climbed into the first tier of presidential contenders, he is attracting attacks from all sides, not just from the left but from the right. Robert Novak has written a column branding him a “false conservative.”

The rise of evangelical Christians as the force that blasted the GOP out of minority status during the past generation always contained an inherent danger: What if these new Republican acolytes supported not merely a conventional conservative but one of their own? That has happened with Huckabee, a former Baptist minister educated at Ouachita Baptist University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The danger is a serious contender for the nomination who passes the litmus test of social conservatives on abortion, gay marriage and gun control but is far removed from the conservative-libertarian model of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Note the condescension oozing from that paragraph. But it marks a true division between the “country club Republicans” and the more populist Christian activists. The former have been quite eager to use Christians and other social conservatives to “blast” Republicans “out of their minority status.” But to actually elect someone like that should not be allowed.

Huckabee’s alleged heresies from conservatism include his calling the elite “Club for Growth” the “Club for Greed,” for having raised taxes as governor of Arkansas, and for being concerned with the environment.

But might a Christianity-informed conservatism be different from the usual kind? Or should two-kingdom Christians focus on these economic issues at the expense of issues such as abortion?

Now that the Pope has legalized the Latin Tridentine mass as an alternative to contemporary Catholic worship, guess who is flocking to those services?

“It’s the opposite of the cacophony that comes with the [modern] Mass,” said Ken Wolfe, 34, a federal government worker who goes to up to four Latin Masses a week in the Washington area. “There’s no guitars and handshaking and breaks in the Mass where people talk to each other. It’s a very serious liturgy.”

And it is a hit with younger priests and their parishioners.

Attendance at the Sunday noon Mass at St. John the Beloved in McLean has doubled to 400 people since it began celebrating in Latin. Most of the worshipers are under 40, said the Rev. Franklyn McAfee.

Younger parishioners “are more reflective,” McAfee said. “They want something uplifting when they go to church. They don’t want something they can get outside.”

For some, the popularity of the service represents the gap between older Catholics, who grew up in the more liberal, post-Vatican II era, and their younger counterparts, who say they feel like they missed out on the tradition that was jettisoned in the move to modernize.

According to Quantum mechanics, observing a system changes it. Now scientists are worried that by observing “dark energy,” we may have shortened the lifespan of the universe.

Please read that linked article. And contemplate this sentence:

Some mathematical theories suggest that, in the very beginning, there was a void that possessed energy but was devoid of substance. Then the void changed, converting energy into the hot matter of the big bang.

Sound familiar? But what is most striking in this article is how contemporary science is no longer working with conventional logical categories, how it has become as mystical and as unbounded as any theology. It is also quite culture-bound: Postmodernists do believe “we create our own reality,” so why should we not be able to deconstruct reality through our perception? This may also herald the rise of a new worldview, with affinities to Hinduism, a new monism of mind and matter. But these scientists think intelligent design is beyond the pale.